Ebay Ads Exec Machinations; Google's Active View Available In Reports

Gautam Thakar has moved on from eBay Advertising and will join LivingSocial as its new CEO and president in mid-August. Read the release. Thakar’s responsibility at eBay Ads was extensive, according to his Linkedin profile: “Responsible for leading eBay's Advertising business including the Shopping.com business. Led a global cross functional team across US, UK, DE, FR, AU and manage all aspects of a large profitable P&L. Key part of the role was transforming Shopping.com to a broader advertising business and leading the business, technology and product teams …” And, read more on ZDnet. Looking at who takes over for Thakar at eBay, sources say Bridget Davies has been running eBay's product listing ads (PLAs) business (i.e. all product SKUs, all CPCs, retailer advertising) for “some time” now. And reporting in to Davies is Stephen Howard-Sarin who is running everything programmatic from a display ad perspective at the company.

Reporting Viewability

In April 2013, Google’s Active View viewability metric was “blessed” by the Media Ratings Council (MRC), which has established independent, third-party standards around viewability of online advertising. On Tuesday, claiming it’s good for brands, Google product manager Sanaz Ahari announced that “the new currency” (i.e., Active View) was officially a part of reporting for the DoubleClick advertising platform. Ahari ascended the pulpit of the DoubleClick Advertiser blog and wrote, “The transition to viewable impressions will not happen overnight, but as more brands, agencies and publishers adopt the viewable standard, we can create a more transparent and actionable display ecosystem for brand advertisers.” Read more. Simply, tech is creating more transparency – which is good for Google as the dollars flow to and through its tech platform. That’s direct-response dollars, brand dollars, all dollars.

Weeding Bots

Cars.com realized something was askew with its web traffic about seven years ago and has since dedicated time and resources to weeding out the bots. Sites like TrueCar and AutoTrader similarly host millions of legitimate visitors a month, but are seeing suspicious surges in traffic. Bot traffic in the auto industry risks damaging the online aggregator sites' relationships with dealers, as inventory is purportedly viewed but never bought. "If you look at the success of AutoTrader over the years, we've built up a large number of listings," says Scott Hernalsteen, AutoTrader's senior director of enterprise analytics. "They could be trying to acquire [the information], accumulate it to repackage it and sell it to others. At the end of the day, we typically don't know." Read more at Ad Age.

The Funnel Of Effectiveness

On Tuesday, Adaptly, Refinery28 and Facebook surfaced with a joint study on the science of social media marketing. The study drills down into the metrics of digital advertising by comparing the effectiveness of leading a consumer down the marketing funnel versus delivering a single call to action. The research hypothesizes that broader brand stories beat out call to action messaging, and the study used Facebook Custom Audience for its data. Results showed that ad sequencing led to an 87% increase in overall view-through and 56% more subscriptions. The takeaway suggests that advertisers would be wise to build brand stories. Go here for the study.

Slicing The Digital Ad Pie

Microsoft will surpass Yahoo in shares of the global digital ad market this year, eMarketer reported on Tuesday. Microsoft's net global ad revenues will account for 2.54% of worldwide shares, up 20% from 2013 and totaling $3.56 billion, according to estimates. Meanwhile, Yahoo's share of the global digital ad market will account for just 2.52%. Google takes the lion's share, netting 31.45% of digital ad dollars, followed by Facebook at 4.09% Read more.

Track The Vote

Political campaigning is taking a cue from ad tech style targeting, says The Wall Street Journal, and leveraging data from Deep Root Analytics to inform a pivot from blanket TV advertising. The targeted ads mine data from TV-measurement firms like Rentrak and Nielsen for information on viewer location and behavior, coupled with voter history. Next, advisers determine which networks and shows host the right voter audience, and ads are placed accordingly. "One of the ways we approached the spending disadvantage is that we decided to buy [media] differently," says Larry Grisolano, President Obama's top media advisor and co-founder of Analytics Media Group. "In politics, as in advertising, you have to follow people by the choices they make," he adds. Read more.

Verifying Location Data

Geotargeting is all the rage, but location-based metrics have been slow to surface. To address the transparency issue, Thinknear launched Location Score Tags on Tuesday, a tool to help marketers measure the accuracy of their location data. "We had impressions falling in places that didn’t make sense, falling into the middle of oceans," Thinknear President Eli Portnoy told Street Fight. "Advertisers don’t know they spent a whole bunch of money on people that aren’t where they thought.” For the time being, the tool is free and available to all marketers. Read on.

Brands Start Snapping

It's early days for Snapchat as far as marketing is concerned, but brands are beginning to eye the platform for promotional potentials. General Electric is now among the handful of brands that are testing the waters, joining others like the NBA, IHOP and Audi. GE is already active on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook building brand awareness. The company was an early Instagram brand partners, and one of the first to pay for sponsored posts. Still no news on monetisation via Snapchat, but the company did add new features on Tuesday that might signal more avenues for brands to climb aboard. Read on at Adweek.